The Twilight Zone

Here's hoping that the 1985 and 1986 versions of The Twilight Zone will one day be released on DVD as it was an outstanding series with well written episodes. The beginning titles have a half-second animation of Rod Serling in them as a salute to the originator of the series. The episode "Nightcrawlers" was directed by William Freidkin and is brilliant. One episode called "Shatterday" features the TV debut of Bruce Willis. There is also a small budget third season which was made after cancellation to make up the numbers for syndication,but it's budget was small and apart from one good episode,where a man is possessed by what looks like Christ,it is a poor third season. But the first two seasons are brilliant.

I still can't get enough of the original series. It is and was a classic, not to mention damn hard to compete with. The Twilight Zone that was resurrected was pretty good in it's own right. The stories I remember most was the Nightcrawlers episode and Cat and Mouse. The same sense of horror, dread and irony filled this series as well. It was pretty good and enjoyable. It was just too bad that it was taken off. It was one of the better of the redone television series.

While many whill claim this as the superior series or vice versa, the reality of the matter is that this series tends to stand on its own two feet. With darker and more modern stories, the regular Joe who might have felt alienated by the original series. One could relate to the power and delicious eeriness of this new collection of nail biting stories and haunting epithets of fear. Very few shows these days put the same amount of passion into a series like this one did for the longest time. Hopefully, the newest incantation will be just as good as the first two. I will state this though, the 1980s version of the theme song and the opening was much better than the original.

The 1985 version of "The Twilight Zone" begins with a major disadvantage: it trailed the original Rod Serling vintage 1960s version! That original series was, and continues to be, the Gold Standard for programs of this type and for better or worse it's unlikely that any show in its wake could achieve that level of greatness.

However, this second attempt did have some positives going for it: First, it featured stories from a host of brilliant s/f writers, including such iconic names as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen King, just to name three. And it had the advantage of better special effects, and color photography.

Unfortunately, the parallels to the original series meant this one was doomed to be considered an also ran, which is a shame, because there were some incredible episodes that I would rank among the best of any science fiction program from any era.

Examples: The astonishing "Profile In Silver" tells the story of a time traveling distant relation to John F. Kennedy, who goes to Dallas in 1963, intending to document, but then preventing the assassination of the President, which creates some surprising results. A remarkable story that is most certainly worthy of the "TZ" moniker.

The amusing "I Of Newton" tells of a professor who offhandedly says he would sell his soul to calculate an equation, but then has to try to back out of the deal when the devil shows up in his classroom to claim it. This is reminiscent of many of the humorous episodes from the original series.

They even did a "remake" of a few eps, like "Button Button," where an impoverished couple was offered the chance to receive a large cash amount if they simply pressed a button. The catch: someone they didn't know would die.

There were some hits and misses in this series, and to a degree, it did often reflect the mentality of the 1980s, rather than tell stories that had a "timeless" quality, which is another disadvantage it has to the original series, but it is most certainly worthy of bearing the name, and is worth seeking out, either on reruns or DVD.

I'm a big fan of the original Twilight Zone, and just as big a fan of this reworking of the 1960's anthology series. My family was thrilled in 1985 that the series had been resurrected. We watched it faithfully every week, no matter what strange day or time slot CBS moved it to and they moved it around to a new time slot each and every week it seemed. It was not a retread of the original show but an updated, modern incarnation that stood on its own. It featured amazing shows which were adaptations of short stories by acclaimed writers.

In the wasteland of 80's TV it stood out for its ingenuity and originality. Alan Brennert's "Her Pilgrim Soul" was, for me, the single best episode produced for weekly series TV since the original went off the air. For my husband it was "Profiles in Silver", a "what if?" for JFK fans. "Nightcrawlers" was a true imaginative nightmare that no one forgot once they watched it. "A Message from Charity" is the second favorite episode for most of the people I talk to. But with the network moving the show around to different days it became hard to find in the listings, and people gradually stopped looking for it because it was too difficult to keep track of. In short, CBS never gave this series the chance it deserved, and it sank into oblivion where the final insult was badly butchered episodes thrown into a syndication package. But despite this the series refused to fade away in fans' memories.

Finally, the first two seasons and the syndie third season (which for the most part is completely forgettable) are out on DVD. They are virtually uncut; some music has been replaced, and there are a few other anomalies. These wonderful stories haven't been seen in their entirety since the series aired over 20 years ago, until now. There are commentaries by Alan Brennert, Harlan Ellison, Phil DeGuere, actors, directors, writers, etc.

This is a must-have for all fans of the Twilight Zone no matter what incarnation, and Night Gallery as well. In many respects this show is a blend of the spirit of the original Twilight Zone and Night Gallery; it uses quality stories by many of the classic sci-fi and horror writers of the past forty years. TV in this new millennium is a wasteland of garbage and nauseous reality TV, and we could use stories and writers like this today. The 1980's Twilight Zone deserves to be seen as the classic it is, and this DVD release does it justice.